@paulbabinski
Department of Religion, UGA Recent publications On the study of looted Qur'ans (with Jan Loop): https://brill.com/view/journals/erl/9/3/article-p239_001.xml On manuscript catalogs: https://www.academia.edu/125336554/The_Manuscript_Catalog_proofs
“God will bring ease after hardship”: 1593 album amicorum entry by Franciscus Raphelengius (1539-1597), quoting from Ecclesiastes (in Hebrew), Apollinaris’s Metaphrase of the Psalms (in Greek), and the Qur’an (in Arabic). Koninklijke Bibliotheek, ms 74 G 21
Lemming died in Madrid in 1819, not long after de Sacy left him the kind note. The manuscript was returned with the rest of Lemming's belongings to Denmark and is today Copenhagen Royal Library, ms Cod. Arab. 228
Parting gift: A manuscript of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt given to a Danish student, Povel Lemming, by his teacher, the great French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy. Its margins are filled with annotations by an earlier French student of Arabic who read the text using a Turkish source.
The Qur’an is described in Raphelengius’s Lexicon and a later note by Golius states it was owned by Arias Montano. Numbering on the margins marks the corresponding surahs in Robert of Ketton’s translation. The manuscript is digitized here: www.alvin-portal.org/alvin/view.j...
Twelfth-century Maghribi Qur’an owned by Benito Arias Montano (1529-1598) and Franciscus Raphelengius (1539-1597). Raphelengius used the Qur’an in compiling the first major Arabic dictionary printed in Europe. Uppsala University Library, ms O Vet. 77
Presumably they were copying the Escorial manuscript of the work (now lost). Lately, I've been puzzling over how this manuscript got to Paris, and what these details might tell us about its copyist. The seventeenth-century annotations are Casaubon's. Cambridge University Library, ms Mm.5.26.
Rushed work: whoever copied this manuscript of Juan Gabriel of Teruel’s Latin Qur'an translation started by only copying the Arabic & the Latin translation, leaving blank columns for Latin transliteration & notes. By the end, however, they simply filled all columns with the translation.
Before we moved away, I saw they were planning to open up a new non-profit video rental store on Main St in Northampton. I don't think return even has to be all that nostalgic. It's practical: there's so little available on streaming and the best service (TUBI) is ad based.
By way of introduction: my book, The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (Toronto: PIMS 2025)
pims.ca/publication/...
Available in North America via @uoftpress.bsky.social, in Europe via @brepols.net, and in digital form by @degruyterbrill.bsky.social
Fabrica linguae Arabicae, a 1639 Arabic-Italian-Latin dictionary by Dominicus Germanus de Silesia, notable for the woodcut calligraphy of its title page and its tree of Arabic verb forms. This copy was owned by the German orientalist Siegmund Fraenkel (1855-1909)
Indeed, Leemann doesn't line up chronologically. Maybe the notes are earlier, and in a different hand (though the handwriting is similar). Perhaps recorded from annotations in another copy? Always possible there's a textual source but can't find it and there are no page numbers.
Not exactly news (since the semester began in August), but I’m very happy to have started a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Georgia.
A pleasant surprise at the Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia: Mark Pattison’s copy of the 1629 edition of Scaliger’s De emendatione temporum, with a few annotations and a lovely nineteenth-century manicule
1656 edition of Thomas Erpenius’s Grammatica Arabica, with the annotations of a seventeenth-century student of Arabic, recording what appears to be instruction from Erpenius’s student (and the editor of this edition), Jacob Golius (1596-1667).
If there's anything more exciting than seeing a book you work on in an exhibition, it's surely being invited to talk about it. Very excited for this event next month!
📷 Lancelot Browne's annotated copy of Avicenna in Arabic at the @rcpmuseum.bsky.social exhibition, 'A body of knowledge'.
Ms. 3406, Süleyman Efendi’s endowment deed on folio 1r. Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ms. 3406 © 2023 by AMS Historica is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Rawda El-Hajji visiting the Church of Our Lady of Buda Castle, Budapest. © Ashraf Sarip
Once a hub of Ottoman culture, Süleyman Efendi’s library was scattered by conquest. In our PhD Research Series, Rawda El-Hajji traces these manuscripts, showing how they help reconstruct lost intellectual communities and reveal the fate of cultural heritage in times of conflict:
uhh.de/csmc-el-hajji
Here’s the link for the talk, “The Royal Danish Library: A Case Study in the History of European Islamic Manuscript Collections”, 25 April, 12:00 PM EDT: www.library.upenn.edu/events/royal...
For instance, one our more exciting discoveries in Copenhagen: this 1633 printing in Arabic of the Poem on the Soul attributed to Ibn Sīnā, which was bound into the Dutch orientalist Jacob Golius’s interleaved & annotated copy of his Proverbia quaedam Alis. CKB, ms Or.Arch. 1-8
This Friday I'll give a talk online (for UPenn's Schoenberg Institute) on the collection of Islamic manuscripts at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Please come (link below)! I’ll be highlighting some of the new finds made by the Copenhagen team of the EuQu project.
Early modern manicule left by an orientalist in a Bologna copy of Saʿdī’s Gulistān. It points to an Ottoman marginal note with the fifteenth-century Turkish translation (by Manyaslı Mahmud) of a passage in the Persian text. Bologna University Library, ms 3280.
That sounds promising. Thank you!
If you’re around, please join! Also, food recommendations for Bologna or Milan are especially welcome. centri.unibo.it/memorylab/en...
I’m very excited to be speaking on March 11 at the University of Bologna on the history of collecting Islamic manuscripts in Europe, for the series “At the Intersection of Multiple Memories. Collecting Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire: The Marsili Case”
Olearius’s notebook is today (with a number of other Olearius manuscripts) in the Berlin State Library and was recently digitized: resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0002F6C50...
“Come to our house without ceremony / For what ceremony is there between you and us” - Persian verse written by Muḥibb ʿAlī, the teacher of a seventeenth-century German traveler in Shamakhi, Adam Olearius (1599-1671), in the notebook Olearius used for studying Persian. SBB-PK, ms or. oct. 3
The three languages of Ottoman learning: notes on Turkish grammar (with the conjugation of "sevmek", to love) recorded by the English orientalist John Greaves (1602-1652) on the flyleaf of a Persian-language grammar of Arabic, also annotated by Greaves. Bodleian, ms Pococke 28.
Robyn's done incredible work on the subject and has managed to track down a bunch of these Istanbul albums. Fascinating manuscript. Thanks for sharing!
A fascinating meeting of two manuscript cultures. The Newberry manuscript uses Ottoman silhouetted paper (with columns for the two hemistichs of Ottoman poetry), turned 90° to record Latin/French sayings. For reference: a collection of Turkish poetry (KB-Copenhagen, ms Cod. Turc. 21)
@robyndoraradway.bsky.social
I think this misrepresents Marchand's criticism of Said, and I certainly wouldn't call her account of nineteenth-century oriental studies de-politicized.